With 1 Successful Start-up Behind Him, SteelBrick CEO Has High Hopes For His New CPQ Venture

Correction: “An earlier version of this article suggested that Godard Abel was the founder of SteelBrick, whereas he is actually the company’s CEO. The post also incorrectly stated that Godard Abel had been directly involved in the sale of Big Machines to Oracle in 2013. Abel left the Company in 2011.”

When Godard Abel arrived in Silicon Valley in 2014 with high hopes of building a start-up from scratch that could leverage the power of one of the world’s most powerful CRM platforms, Saleforce.com, there was one thing that set him apart from the majority of wannabe entrepreneurs in the Bay Area trying to secure funding to supercharge their companies. Abel had already built one $50m revenue company, and helped to secure its exit to
Oracle for over $400m dollars.

Even more remarkably, Godard had built his first company, Big Machines, not in the Valley, but in Chicago. As Godard put it when I spoke to him this week, when it comes to multimillion dollar cutting edge software start-up exits, Chicago “is a little off the beaten path”, but for this calm, humble, yet determined founder, it was the perfect place to start.

Educated at MIT and Stanford, there was never any doubt in Godard’s mind that he would pursue a career in software engineering. His bio on the website of SteelBrick, the Silicon Valley based Configure Price Quote sales software firm he joined as CEO following Big Machines, after investing personally in the company, describes him as “an odd combination of a laid back German and determined, precise, American engineer.”

SteelBrick CEO Godard Abel; photo courtesy of Steelbrick

It’s a fitting description indeed. Abel was born in Monchengladbach, near the Dutch border, and is still a big fan of the local football team, who recently climbed to second in the German league table, just behind the mighty Bayern Munich, the Harlem Globetrotters of German football, with a team crammed full of highly paid superstars.

Abel’s companies have a great deal more in common with his local club than with the mighty Bayern. He prefers to lead hard working, humble and honest teams, rather than brash “rock star” types. He doesn’t get jealous of the bigger players in his industry, rather he admires their success, and looks to partner with them. And most of all, he understands that there are no easy wins; partnering with the biggest companies and most talented people means performing to the best of your abilities every day. It’s a trait Godard identifies with and he has always tried to surround himself with loyal staff who think in the same way. Perhaps that is why so many of his team at Big Machines have followed him to the Valley to join him at SteelBrick.

“We’re not
Google or Salesforce”, he told me, “but we look up to them and always try to hire staff with high aspirations; hard workers and diamonds in the rough. We prefer to develop our own talent and we’ve successfully built tight knit teams that have proved more than capable of disrupting the space we operate in and providing superb quality and value for money to our clients.”

SteelBrick's CPQ software; photo courtesy of SteelBrick

Steelbrick makes selling simple by automating quoting, contracting, and ordering processes for companies, which helps them to grow faster. SteelBrick CPQ is built entirely on the Salesforce1 cloud and mobile platform, and works straight out of the box, 5-10x faster than traditional CQP, the company believes. This makes the product ideal for smaller companies that are looking to scale fast. Customers can go live with the software in a matter of weeks, rather than months, or even, in some cases, years.

It’s a high growth, cutting edge industry; hi tech cloud companies are the biggest vertical, the majority of which are based in California, although SteelBrick has expanded its operations internationally with customers as far afield as Australia, and offices in the Bay Area, Chicago, London and Germany. Customers include famous names such as Cloudera, Hootsuite, NetMotion, and outside of the States, Mitsubishi.

The versatility of SteelBrick’s software means it can solve the numerous pain points experienced by growing B2B companies. Pricing complexity, and contract by contract negotiations, for example, slow down the sales process and lead to low customer retention rates; SteelBrick’s product ensures that doesn’t happen by making it easier than ever before to agree a sale that fully supports both party’s requirements, as their client testimonials prove.

“It’s about making our customers happy and helping them grow faster and more profitably”, says Abel.

Back in Chicago, when he was building Big Machines from scratch, Abel had grown the business organically, without completing any fundraising deals. He calls it “organic bootstrap mode”, and believes the experience has been a key factor in allowing him to secure $30m of investment in SteelBrick from investors in the Valley, most notably Emergence Capital, and Shasta Ventures, who also funded IoT giants Nest, plus Salesforce themselves.

“Chicago was such a great place to learn the fundamentals of business and create a positive working culture; it’s part of the DNA of our business”, Godard explains.

“I still see us as a start-up; a small, nimble company with kind of an underdog mentality”. While that’s certainly true and a testament to the way Abel and his management team, many of whom have been with him since the early days of Big Machines, stuck together, SteelBrick has adapted seamlessly to its environment and is now scaling fast just like its customers, with nearly 80 staff and 220 clients.

Godard’s admiration for Salesforce stems from “their rate of growth, you can almost feel it when you are dealing with them, and that’s what makes them such an attractive partner”. What is interesting is that, similar to
Apple’s app store, hundreds of companies build on the Salesforce platform, using their API to create customer focused apps which they hope will uncover demand and lead to a high growth start-up, but not many succeed. Godard believes that, by learning valuable business lessons away from the Valley and out of the spotlight, he gained the experience to deal with anything the Valley could throw at him.

He does have one regret about Chicago and Big Machines however. That he was unable to take the company to the IPO stage, a regret he shares with his key staff, the trusted group of advisors who have been with him almost since day one and whom he often praises during our call for their hard work, dedication and loyalty to the cause. So could an IPO be in the offing one day for SteelBrick?

“We are at least 2 years away from having to think about that”, Godard says, but it certainly seems as though he and SteelBrick are adjusting well to life in the Bay Area, and although their focus remains on the day to day minutiae of delivering best in class service, growing organically, and planning for expansion, SteelBrick’s team deservedly have half an eye on the major leagues.

“Our client base is maybe not the same client base as a Deloitte or an Accenture has, and our fees reflect that, but our customers will find it easier to self-implement and deploy under their own steam, which means significant cost savings, which not many of our competitors can match, he explains.

Godard Abel draws some of his inspiration from figures such as Elon Musk, and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. A lot like his favourite football team, he has unexpectedly gotten to within touching distance of some of his heroes; there’s still a long way to go but perhaps SteelBrick will prove to Abel that he and his team have more and more in common with their role models than they thought, not least a flourishing business.